briefingpaper: Digital Tools for Musicology

This paper introduces, and reflects on, a selection of recent and current technical approaches to musicology with a view to promoting and encouraging the use of ICT techniques for research within the discipline.
In all arts and humanities disciplines there are areas of enquiry that more or less lend themselves to computational methods of research and the field of music is no exception. For the purposes of the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), the fields encompassed by the discipline of ‘music’ include:

‘Composition and performance (including classical, commercial, and popular); history and criticism of music; ethnomusicology; theory and analysis, including empirical approaches; technology and computer applications.’

This is one way of breaking down the complex relations between sub-disciplines but one could equally talk in terms of the different domains of music as being either acoustic (physical), auditory (perceived) or graphemic (notated). Definitions can be problematized further by consideration at any length of concepts such as ‘composition’ and ‘performance’. The opportunities afforded by software to analyse and then reengineer existing music blur traditional definitions of the first term, whilst the latter has to support an enormous diversity of potential investigative approaches including: physiology, psychology, acoustics, material studies, cognition, perception etc.

http://methodsnetwork.ac.uk/redist/pdf/wkp02.pdf

This paper is one of nine working papers written for the AHRC ICT Methods Network. The Methods Network Working Papers form part of the range of information and support materials that have been assembled to assist arts and humanities researchers with the task of acquiring knowledge about ICT tools and methods. The papers focus on various different disciplines but also highlight where tools and methods can be of benefit to multiple subject areas.

It is anticipated that these documents may serve a number of non-exclusive functions:

• To provide a foundation document to provoke discussion and value-added commentary;
• As reference documents that foreground links and references to other material;
• As an introductory resource for researchers who are new to digital developments in a particular subject area;
• As a knowledge-gathering exercise to assist the Methods Network with event organisation and community-building activities.